Psychological pressure in competitive environments: Evidence from a randomized natural experiment: Comment, Second Version

Apesteguia and Palacios-Huerta (APH, forthcoming) report for a sample of 129 soccer penalty shootouts from various seasons in ten different tournaments that teams kicking first win significantly more often than teams kicking second by a margin of 21 percentage points. Collecting data for 470 shootouts, including all of APH's shootouts, we cannot replicate their result. Teams kicking first win 53.4% of shootouts, which is not significantly different from the a priori expected 50%. Our finding implies that (1) APH's results are not generally robust; (2) using selective subsamples without a coherent criterion for data inclusion might lead to non-representative results.